Summer 2003. I suffer a serious shoulder injury. A friend suggests I go to a massage clinic that employs blind masseurs. The clinic is not far from my home, perhaps less than a hundred meters away, but I had never noticed it.
Yes, I later realized that I had never paid attention to the lives of blind people — until I needed their help. I was wary when I stepped into the massage clinic for the first time. I tend to prejudge situations based on my common sense. My logic that day was: All blind people are unfortunate. They are miserable, paranoid, unsociable, dour and boring. How could they help me? But my common sense does not always make sense. I quickly realized that the blind masseurs were a happy crowd. They were happier than I was. Their happiness affected me, day by day. After a month of therapy, the blind masseurs had cured my shoulder injury. By then, I had become very fond of the clinic. I kept going back even though I no longer needed treatment. I went there simply to chat with the masseurs. As time went by, I made new discoveries: Perhaps because of their physical limitation, blind masseurs particularly care about how people see them. They also have a profound sense of personal dignity. All of the healers I met possess it. There is nothing grand about it, but it is powerful. Dignity. If you ask me to comment on today’s multifaceted China, I would say that we Chinese are abandoning our self-respect and losing our sense of dignity. In the void, Chinese culture is becoming more and more vulgar. This is a serious social problem. Our language perpetuates the vulgarity. I grew up experiencing the lethal power of our language. I was born in 1964 and grew up during the Cultural Revolution. I saw many big-character posters that were often used for rabid attacks, and I witnessed many public denunciations. The red terror in those days was of course delivered through whipping and beating. But more often, it was delivered through violent language. When I was small, I thought my father’s name was Father. One day, in the roar of a public denunciation, I learned otherwise: An old lady said to me, “Did you hear that? They’re shouting ‘Down with Bi Ming.’ Bi Ming is your father.” The language violence of the Revolution originated from violent politics. This violence came from the top leadership and radiated all the way to the grass-roots level of society. It destroyed many honest and compassionate souls. What about now? The China of today is moving forward… toward money. Every coin has become a rolling wheel, and to chase those wheels we no longer care about civility. We behave like hysterical people barking out dirty words on the street — every single word that comes out is covered with obscene saliva. Our economy is booming. People will do anything to strike it rich. This is a time of shamelessness. Whoever is mindful of the shamefulness becomes a loser. To be honest I am not very sensitive to what’s happening in the world I live in because I don’t maintain enough distance to observe it. From the day I stepped into the massage clinic, apart from noticing the happiness of the workers, I felt there was something different about the masseurs. What was it? I couldn’t describe it at the time. One day I had a chance to find the answer. I attended an evening banquet. Everyone there was what we consider a successful person. At the table, everyone was playing with their mobile phones. Many were sending text messages, with salacious satisfaction written on their faces. Then the recitations started. Everyone read aloud dirty jokes they had received on their phones; everyone laughed and mocked basic principles of decorum. Only one thing remained: banter about sex, that private and exciting theme. After attending the banquet, I went to the massage clinic. I felt I’d arrived in a different world. This is a world that is distanced from our times, away from mainstream society. In this world, there is hard work. In this world, all people maintain their dignity. They are polite, friendly and clean. At that moment, I could finally see the mainstream society that I live in. This discovery was striking: We normal people are becoming more and more shameless on our way to getting rich. We have lost our dignity, that very basic necessity, like rice, tea and salt; things that mankind respects and tries to preserve. A thought emerged — I would write a book about my blind friends. When I started writing the book, I did not want to achieve anything grand. I did not want to tie the fate of my characters in the novel with history and ideology, as I had done previously. My hope was simple: to truthfully present the everyday life of blind people in my novel. I believed that would say a lot. My experience as a writer in the past 20 years tells me that readers are always smarter than authors. Writing the book was like a game of tug of war. I tried to pull the dark world out to the sun. I wanted to tell my readers that in our society, there is still a group of people who have not given up their principles. In fact, these blind people live a more normal life than we normal people do. Of course, the desire to write comes about easily. But I also needed a catalyst to start. I was lucky again. One evening as usual I went to the masseurs’ dormitory to chat. We later decided to go out to get something to eat. The staircase in the building is blindingly dark. I held the hand of a masseuse, offering to help her walk down the stairs. My steps were hesitant in the darkness. Then the masseuse said, “Mr. Bi, why don’t you let me help you?” The blind girl tugged my hand. I followed her rhythm and strode down. It was easy. As soon as we arrived at the ground floor, the girl turned to me and said, “Mr. Bi, I can do better than you, right?” My mind was suddenly overwhelmed by inexplicable thoughts. At that moment, the catalyst for my story appeared. I was ready. Thirteen months later, I finished my novel Massage . (The English translation will be published next year.) I believe it is an ambitious work: The novel is not just about a few blind masseurs; it attempts to present the world of blind people. What happened that night still touches me. Please do not ask me what those thoughts were. I will not tell you. In fact, I cannot de-scribe them. My strength is to tell someone else’s story, not my own. All I can tell you is: I almost cried at that moment, but I didn’t. At my request, we gave each other a hug. A version of this special report appeared in print on June 22, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opinion/global-agenda-magazine-the-blind-leading.html?ref=ihtmagazineglobalagendajune2012&pagewanted=all -- You can join my Google Group: 'World Opinion' https://groups.google.com/group/worldopinion/about?hl=en Avinash Shahi M.A. Political Science CPS JNU New Delhi India Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
